With a scant 671 days to go until voting day, a growing gaggle of Democratic presidential hopefuls are jockeying for position in a rare race to oust a sitting president after only one term.

Only once since the Second World War has a party failed to hold on to the White House for two terms or more. That was in 1980. Jimmy Carter lost after only a single term to Ronald Reagan in the wake of an oil price shock and the humiliation of the Iran hostage crisis, which left the Democratic president looking weak and indecisive. Donald Trump’s record is very different, but makes him equally vulnerable. Trump’s chronically low approval rating, his bitter, divisive style, and petty attacks on allies and adversaries have created a political landscape so hostile that Democrats sense a real chance to defeat him after only four years in the Oval Office.

But first, a major fight is brewing over the future of the Democratic Party itself.

The probable field of candidates is sharply divided. There’s a group of old, white, and familiar presidential wannabes, and another of significantly younger, more diverse and less well-known potential contenders.

The oldies include former vice-president Joe Biden, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who waded into the 2020 race on New Year’s Eve by announcing she’s launching a presidential exploratory committee. Both Biden (twice) and Sanders have previously failed to win the Democratic nomination. Age and health concerns hang over their presumed presidential ambitions. Biden would be 78 and Sanders 79 at their inauguration, nearly a decade older than Trump was when he was elected. At 69, Warren would also be older than either Hillary Clinton or Trump when they ran in 2016.

In a clumsy effort to add an element of diversity to her resumé this fall, Warren said a DNA analysis backed up her claim to traces of Native American ancestry. Native American groups denounced her and Trump pilloried her as “Pocahontas.” It rather typified the unsuccessful efforts by the old, white and familiar group to cast themselves as something more.

If Democrats are looking for something new and different, there should be plenty of choices. Four senators and a congressman — all a generation or more younger — will offer clear alternatives. All five are currently considering seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. They are:

California Sen. Kamala Harris, 54, the daughter of a Tamil mother and a Jamaican father, went to high school in Montreal, where her mother, a breast cancer researcher, was teaching at McGill. Harris, a lawyer, attended the historically black Howard University in Washington and was district attorney of San Francisco, then attorney general of California, before being elected to the Senate in 2016.

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, 49, is a Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law School graduate with an activist streak and a flair for political drama. While on Newark’s city council, he staged a 10-day hunger strike while living in a tent. After two controversial terms as the mayor of Newark, Booker was elected to the Senate in 2012 and is the most prominent African-American since Barack Obama to be considered a likely presidential candidate.

Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, 58, is a former prosecutor and corporate lawyer who has demonstrated an unusual ability to win bipartisan support, while emerging as a rising star of the Democratic Party. As of last month, she had sponsored or co-sponsored 111 pieces of legislation that actually became law, despite the deep partisan divide. She’s a moderate with a proven track record of winning in rural, white, working-class districts where Trump is strongest.

Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, 46, vaulted to national prominence with a stunning performance in Republican red Texas in the November midterms. He only narrowly lost to Sen. Ted Cruz, and raised an astonishing $70 million while running a folksy campaign that toured the state in a pickup truck, yet was appealing to young voters. Fluent in Spanish, O’Rourke is flirting with a run for the presidency that, like Obama’s, would focus on youth and change rather than experience or policy.

New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, 52, has attracted national attention for her strident focus on sexual harassment and assault, both in the U.S. military and civilian life. She endeared herself to the #MeToo movement, while infuriating some prominent Democrats with her early and very public demands that Minnesota Democrat Sen. Al Franken quit after multiple reports that he had groped women. Gillibrand was a close ally of the Clintons and likely remains their preferred choice if she runs.

A half-dozen others are reportedly considering their chances, including billionaire and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, and Julián Castro, who was Obama’s housing secretary and a former mayor of San Antonio.

Even Hillary Clinton, currently on a 13-city book tour, has been musing publicly that she’s still the most qualified candidate.

Not surprisingly, given their long political careers and national name recognition, Biden and Sanders currently lead in early polls in the small, rural and unrepresentative states of Iowa and New Hampshire, where the first — and thus disproportionately important — primaries are held.

Democrats, united only by their desire to defeat Trump, otherwise remain as divided as they were in 2016 when the controlling Clinton wing of the party defeated Sanders and the progressives, in part by rigging the primary process.

So the party faces a gruelling internal struggle that will be both ideological and generational before it settles on a nominee to take on Trump, who, unless he quits or is driven from office, will almost certainly seek a second term in 2020.

For decades, Democrats have claimed their party is the one of inclusion, diversity and social justice. Now they may face a tough choice between the political pragmatism of picking a presidential candidate most likely to appeal to Trump’s base of white, rural and less-educated-than-average voters, or one who reflects the party’s view of itself and the fast-changing demographic future of America.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

More from iPolitics

X

Join the conversation. It gets feisty!

Author

Paul Koring has covered international affairs, including conflicts and crises from the Cold War to Afghanistan, reporting from Europe, the Middle East, South Asia and Africa.
Paul's award-winning reporting has ranged from Prague’s Velvet Revolution to the gassing of the Kurds in Iraq and detainee-abuse in Afghanistan.
He was a foreign correspondent for The Globe and Mail for more than 25 years and won the Michener Award for public service journalism for his work on detainee torture and abuse in Afghanistan in 2007. He nominated for another Michener in 2009 for his investigation in Ottawa’s unlawful imposition of forced exile on a Canadian citizen.
He is also a winner of Amnesty International’s award for human-rights journalism and The Globe’s Richard Doyle award for reporting.
Prior to joining The Globe, he was posted to New York and London for Canadian Press.